NZ's official mega-site nearly complete

By PETER GRIFFIN

New Zealanders will get their first glimpses of what e-government has to offer in early July, when the www.govt.nz portal comes online.

The State Services Commission's E-Government Unit is putting the finishing touches on the portal, which is expected to be the public's preferred means of dealing with government agencies by 2004.

It will link 65 agencies and offer one route to around 1000 government services.

A working model of the portal's front page appears to have borrowed designs from popular search engines such as www.yahoo.com.

An alphabetical listing of topics from arts, culture and history through to transport directs users to the area they are interested in.

But a search engine also enables key words to be entered.

The "Things to know when" service mirrors the "life events" portal model that has been popular overseas and has information on everything from caring for an elderly person to going hunting or fishing.

Although the site design will receive further tweaking, masses of information about government services is already in place.

Making that available to the public involves the collection of metadata, which determines where information comes from and how it is formatted. Hypertext markup language (HTML)-based meta tags enable metadata to be embedded invisibly on web pages.

Edwin Bruce, delivery manager at the E-Government Unit, said each participating agency had been responsible for collecting its own metadata and would continue to do so.

"A metadata management facility is being deployed to agencies in the next two weeks. Agencies get browser screens where they can enter details of services."

Datacom is hosting the portal at sites in Auckland and Wellington, while Copeland Wilson Associates New Media will design the front end, public interface side of the portal. It finished building a prototype in early February.

Bruce, who is on secondment from the Ministry of Fisheries where he is chief information officer, said most of the project was in the hands of internet company gen-i, as it was taking care of all the metadata collection.

Web servers for the portal were being run on Apache open source software, and the back end databases were running on a mixture of Linux and Windows NT.

The first phase emphasised providing information directly to the public. Development in the next 18 months would focus on service delivery and online transactions.

Andrea Gray, relationships manager at the E-Government Unit, said some individual government organisations already offered services such as fines payment online. "There may be the potential for an all-of-government arrangement in later phases of portal development."

That would have to wait for an authentication system that would allow payments to government departments to be made securely through the site.

The E-Government Unit was looking at a "vault" system employed in Ireland, where citizens chose which government departments they wanted to deal with, using one, universal authentication.

Bruce said compiling services for the portal had to account for a large amount of overlap between agencies.

"In some cases, four-plus organisations are involved.

"Directing people to four different websites logically makes no sense, but bringing them together is a huge job," he said.

One example, he said was student loans, where the Ministry of Social Development, IRD and the universities could be involved.

He said the second phase of the portal plan could include personalisation, similar to that which some internet service providers offer customers.